


The Wicked Way of Our World

by menocchio



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: (commensurate with the character of Alfie and the show at large), Blood and Gore, Derogatory Language, Hand Jobs, M/M, Penicular Culture Exchange, Pre-Series, Trench Warfare, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 23:39:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16881468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/menocchio/pseuds/menocchio
Summary: On a muddy field in France, a half-mad captain meets a shell-shocked sergeant major.





	The Wicked Way of Our World

**Author's Note:**

> I'm such a weak bitch for Tom Hardy, what the hell.

_Since he got back from France, Tommy doesn't want anybody at all.  
\- Harry Fenton_

  


“Now the devil,” Alfie says to his companion, “they say he's out here in the mud with the rest of us, driving us on to murder – where do you stand on murder, Fritz? On the philosophy that this, this is all murder. Murder, war, all the same thing, but who owns the sin, right, is what I want to know. Is it the man who stuck the spike through your throat, or the one who sent him to do it?”

As a captain, the logic of this question leaves him open for a double share of responsibility, but that's just fair. He has shot many men, a few his own: judged and sentenced on the spot for not getting up and out to shoot at others. The earth is a beast that must be fed its daily ration of meat, or so it feels sometimes.

His companion, like so many before him, does not answer. Alfie rubs his chin, sniffs, and continues:

“Anyway, the devil's out here, I believe that. But it's nonsense to think he's a literal manifestation, some supernatural agent of evil. Nah, nah, that ain't the way, mate. The devil exists in the hearts and minds of men. That's all that is. All any of this is. It's a _metaphor_.” Alfie gestures around the trench at the compacted mud and fallen cadavers. “Pure superstition, innit.”

He turns and looks square in Fritz's remaining good eye, which insists on staring glassily at the wrong angle to meet his gaze. Come to think of it, the skin on his face is mottled, too. He will probably start to bloat and smell soon, the borders of his body collapsing out to join the mosaic of rot already surrounding them.

Alfie grimaces and shifts a couple inches away, but the sandbag at his back must have more bits of Bill than soil in it, because something knobbly like an elbow jabs him right square in the ribs.

“It's just not fucking rational,” he tries again, going for apologetic, but breaks off to look up sharply in surprise.

His attention has been captured by the glint of a harness on a dead horse lying some fifteen feet beyond the trench.

The sun is coming up. It is to be a new day.

Yesterday the world ended but it didn't register much difference here in the trenches. It is the same, started anew; still the end of days and maybe always will be.

* * *

Alfie lost his mind somewhere along the Somme near Verdun.

Closest he can figure, it leaked out of him in dribs and drabs whilst he was otherwise occupied with running and shooting and shitting. Not like he raised his head one day and found it irreparably altered – it came on more slowly than that.

But sometimes it does come all at once, like when the luncheon shelling starts up before he's finished his tea. A blackened finger might land in his cuppa and suddenly he'll be yelling about supply lines over the thunder of artillery to a terrified lad cradling his own intestines in his lap like he don't obviously have bigger problems at hand.

That's the real issue – the funny business with his head makes rapport with the men a bit difficult. A callous sort might point out that they're all dying faster than the battalion can rotate the company out for replacements anyway. Hard to build up much in the way of a _connection_.

What kind of connection would they really want, him possessing a battlefield commission and being a Jew besides – that's two strikes against him right there. If men are going to throw themselves over the trenches to get blown away for the sake of the Allies owning a couple feet of mud, they might prefer to do it at the behest of a posh C of E toff in a pencil thin mustache.

(Maybe Alfie should grow a mustache. Or even go full-bore and let a beard come in. That would be a laugh for the boys back home, wouldn't it, Alfie Solomons went to war and finally found his spiritual side.)

Still, don't seem right, sending boys out to die without learning their names. He has to track who's perished on any given day via process of elimination and a tally sheet in his pocket. More than once he's thought he's lost little Private Callahan, only for the teeny fuck to roll out of a muddy hole in the ground at the end of the day, the miracle mole of the Coldstream Guards.

The other problem is a lack of what one might call spiritual sensitivity. One of Alfie's men will be dying or just cracking up a bit, crying about hell on earth or whether he'll go to Heaven when he dies after all the slaughterin' he's done down here, and apparently it just doesn't _do_ to tell him: no worries, hell doesn't exist. All he's got, all he'll ever have, is what he has right now.

(All he has right now being this square foot of mud and the sullied uniform on his back.)

The men don't seem to like that, not one bit. And Alfie's insane, not slow, so he can see why they wouldn't. But what's the old phrase? There's no use crying over spilled milk, right, and there's no use despairing over the wasted potential of one's brief sojourn in the living world.

Seems clear enough.

* * *

They've just been rotated off the front, such as it is. He's got a gamy foot he's been dithering about seeing to, so once it's proper light out he informs battalion and heads for the nearest Casualty Clearing Station. These days that's 34 CCS stationed near La Chapellette.

 _La Chapellette_. He doesn't like the way these French names sit about, their soft phonems growing fat and lazy in his mouth before finally fucking off proper into the world. La fucking Chapellette. It doesn't sound like somewhere that should have a couple hundred blank-faced men sitting or standing about in clumps of battle-dressed bloodstained rags.

The 34 CCS consists of a repurposed barn housing serious cases awaiting transport and the walking wounded who need to be kept clean and dry for a spell, and an acre of formerly white tents for processing and evaluation of everyone else. Like everything within fifty miles, the grounds are a saturated bog of muck. Unlike everything, the men are standing above ground and in the open.

It's a strange sight to see, and Alfie's not having it, mate. Too exposed. He walks a little apart from the main queue – better to keep an eye if dirt and bodies start exploding and raining bits – and hunkers down close to the ground.

It's better this way. He's getting the most out of his vacation from the trenches, clearing his nose of the almighty stench of too many ripe bodies and dead bodies and what come spraying and leaking from both. There's a slight breeze blowing over the field and it's not carrying poison gas. This is what is considered an idyll, he supposes.

He's never cared for the countryside. After this is all over, should he survive, he doesn't think that will change. Give him the crowded streets of Camden Town any day, with its bombardment of smells and noises, the warnings as obvious as France's tell-tale percussive shelling that one must stay alert and watch one's back. It was so much better than this lying quiet place on the edge of the fighting.

Presently, a solitary man wanders up and stands staring at the line of wounded. Alfie shifts his weight on his haunches and studies him.

He cuts a strange figure – his trousers are stiff with dried mud, the kind of stiff that means its gone all the way through the fabric time and again, that they're more mud than fiber at this point. Likewise his neck and hair are streaked with it; his face is a little better, the recognizable result of a hasty splash of a canteen and cursory scrubbing.

His tunic is clean.

Perhaps not clean-clean, not marching-fresh-from-home clean, but it's damn near spotless next to the rest of him. Alfie might suspect him of being a Jerry and nicking the jacket off a British soldier, but no British soldier around here has a jacket clean as this.

Still, he doesn't come from careless people; best do right by them and check. “You all right there, mate?” he calls over. “You look a bit lost.”

The wariness that instantly comes over the man is interesting. Either he _is_ a Jerry or he doesn't like to be obvious about vulnerability. He approaches Alfie and doesn't so much wander as stroll. Studied carelessness.

Closer, he can read the jacket; Jerry's a Sergeant Major. Closer still, and he can see his face. Jerry's got a good face. Pretty, with the kind of merciless bone structure that inspires tragedies and a pair of lips that'll turn a man onto poetry for want of access.

Alfie thinks: the worms and maggots will make a king's feast out of them pretty blue eyes. And once they've finished cleaning every bit of flesh from the bone, they'll make a king's palace out of them orbits, they will.

“Were you talking to me – Captain?” the man asks him, taking belated notice of his filthy uniform.

Ah, ain't no way he's a Jerry with that accent, not unless the Germans been going deep cover with Brummies.

“You looking for something, Sergeant Major?”

“Yes, I – my,” he turns his head and with it his whole body, slowly spinning to survey the field, “brothers. I think.”

“You've come to the wrong fucking place for brotherhood, my friend.”

The man's eyes go narrow in thought, like he's seriously considering what Alfie's just told him. Damn time someone does. These days, his men get this look on their faces when he starts talking, like they think they're taking orders from a mad dog. And they ask him questions what are the wrong questions and blanch when he gives answers to the questions they should be asking in the first place.

“Don't you remember?” he asks. “Your name, sure. Man don't forget the name his mother gives him.”

“Tommy,” says Sergeant Major Blue Eyes, and Alfie snorts, because there are a million Tommies on the Western Front. The other man frowns and amends, “Tommy Shelby.”

“Well, Tommy Shelby, what happened to you?”

It takes a while to get the answer to that one. Tommy looks at the long line of men again. Eventually he says slowly, “I think I was blown up.”

“If you was blown up, you're the luckiest cunt I've ever seen. Don't look like you got a scratch on you.”

Tommy focuses on him again, and Alfie likes that, he does. “You're really a captain?”

“I've been thinking of growing the mustache,” he explains, but this seems to just confuse the lad further. “Never mind. Yeah, I'm a fucking captain. We're fighting in a modern army, haven't you heard?”

“Right,” says Tommy after a moment. “Right.”

His hands start patting the pockets of his too-clean tunic. Presently, he fishes out his cigarettes and lights one.

Alfie squints at the tunic some more, and it finally comes to him. “Fuck, mate. You're a tunneller, ain't you.”

Tommy doesn't seem to like that question, because he goes away behind his eyes for a while and doesn't answer. Alfie gets creeped out being stood over by a ghost and reaches out to tug him gently down. He settles beside him on the ground, obedient whilst in the depths of his stupor.

Spend enough time in the war, and Alfie certainly has, and one can distinguish the finer features of what first appears to be a homogenous palette of nightmares. A dark stain on the pale wool of a uniform can be diagnosed as blood, bile, shit, or coffee. Well, same as there's different types of filth, there's different types of madness. Alfie's learned to recognize madness like a master distiller knows what was in the original wash by the smell and look of a spirit. And beautiful young Tommy here's got shell-shock.

He watches Tommy's cigarette burn down to his stained fingers. Slowly, a person seeps back in behind his eyes.

“If you're here to figure out what's wrong with you, I can save you the trouble and the doc's time. Shell shock. Nothing to be done, it's incurable.” He thinks about that for a moment. “Sorry.”

“Shell shock,” says Tommy, disbelieving like Galileo recanting to a Vatican inquisitor.

“You've got that nervy look,” he says, not because it's true, but because he wants to see how he'll react. Some blokes, they get quick fucking righteous at the slightest accusation of any kind of emotional abnormality. But he doesn't think Tommy is like that, no. This lad is maybe the stillest he's ever seen.

“Do I seem nervous?” the man asks, seeming darkly amused by the very thought.

“No, nervy. It's – it's the same, but different.”

“Well, I was just blown up.” He turns a new cigarette into his mouth and lights it and gives Alfie a delightful ironical look. “Seems like it would be a rational response. Being... nervy.”

“Rational, right.” Alfie nods and strokes his chin. “Fucking right – _rational_. Exactly.”

Tommy smiles coolly and continues smoking.

Alfie finds himself feeling strangely fond – this filthy, scorched angel who so clearly wants to imagine himself existing apart from it all. He wonders if he actually has brothers or if that was part of the shock. Perhaps he's here just for Alfie, bearing a sort of message of relief: _you've gone a bit mad, Alfie Solomons, but you'll be all right_.

Alfie thinks about that and then, very deliberately, reaches over and puts his hand on the pretty sergeant major's thigh.

There's warmth there, bleeding through the worn stretch of filthy fabric. It's warm where Alfie's been surrounded by only cold, stiff bodies for so long. And Tommy's not some lad he'll have to nudge into a deadly assault with a revolver at his back, no.

Tommy looks down at the hand through the curling smoke of his cigarette with all the blank detachment of a man looking at a limb that was until a few seconds ago still attached to his body.

“And what would you do if I called over a corporal and told him about this?” he asks curiously, switching that dead-eyed gaze to Alfie, where it sharpens with awareness. But it's calculation in those eyes, not disgust.

“Dunno,” says Alfie, pure honesty. “Chances are, it would get ugly.”

“Ugly?”

“Bloody.”

“Ah.” He glances back down to the hand on his leg. “So this is a threat.”

Alfie narrows his eyes. “Would you prefer it to be? You sound more sure of yourself this way, not going to lie.”

He doesn't answer, and Alfie doesn't stop looking at him. Prey or predator, you best keep your eyes on it, that's the thinking he's always been told.

But maybe he should ease up on his hand. Boy's a tunneller, he probably needs his leg. Otherwise what will he use for kicking clay?

Before he can lift it away, Tommy grabs his wrist and says, “Do you see that stand of trees to the west?”

Alfie doesn't look over, but he doesn't need to. “First I've seen in weeks ain't sawdust. Yeah, mate, I see them.”

“Meet me there in ten minutes,” he says, and releases Alfie's wrist, at the same time pushing it off his leg so he's free to stand up – which he does, straightening out the exhausted length of his whipcord body. Alfie could get him in a pinch grip tie and he'd never get out of it, not unless Alfie let him, which he would because he's a fucking gentleman.

Tommy doesn't look at Alfie as he leaves.

“That's what's called an assignation,” Alfie says, to no one.

* * *

“You don't blink very often, did you know?” Tommy asks him a quarter of an hour later, once Alfie's tracked him down in the shade of the (non-exploding, undamaged) trees to the west of the station.

He's leaning one shoulder up against the (non-exploding, undamaged) trunk of a great ash, watching Alfie approach. He's not smoking, and Alfie wonders if he's just run out of tobacco or if he thought he'd be putting that mouth to better use soon enough.

He eases in close, resting his hands not on the boy but the tree, until he's got him in a sort of loose embrace. Easy to spring apart fast, if need be. Easy, too, to enclose.

“Well, Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby, until such time as the next generations start being born in the trenches and come equipped with the right sort of eyes suited to the work, we unevolved soldiers need to keep our eyes open at all times for trouble.”

“The right sort of eyes,” says Tommy. He's got his head back against the tree, almost withholding, and is watching him through his lashes. He's got long lashes, does Tommy. Alfie cants his head so he can get a better look at them.

“Yeah, beady. Beady eyes like a mole or badger. S'the future of soldiering.”

The corners of his mouth indent, and it's not a smile but it's something. He's made him feel something.

“What's your name?” Tommy asks.

The question makes Alfie rear back a little, pure surprise. After a moment he laughs. He watches Tommy look at his mouth and laughs some more.

“Alfie,” he says, closing the distance between them until he's gifting the name direct to the other man's lips. “I'm Alfie.”

One of those clever, stained hands finds its way to his belt. Alfie is about to press closer, but a thought make him pause and draw back. Tommy's hands go still.

“Change your mind?” he asks, and despite the quickened pace of breath Alfie can feel plain on his cheek, his voice comes out calm, like he's indifferent to the answer.

Can't really change a mind that's been broke, but never mind all that. Alfie bends his head, drawing his mouth over the long hot stretch of his neck. He breathes in and wonders at how clean Tommy smells – not clean like home, like indoor plumbing and a life safe and easy, but clean like soil so deep, there's nothing down there but fossils. The only death long in the past.

Alfie kisses the side of his neck, once and almost chaste. Tommy's breath shudders out of him – not so indifferent, despite the facade he puts up.

He drags his mouth up to his ear and says, “Your uniform's clean, innit. It'll be dead obvious what we got up to, state mine's in.”

He swears he feels the flutter of those lashes blinking against his face. After a moment, Tommy's arms move, hands leaving Alfie's belt to reach up and work the buttons of his own uniform.

 _Good boy._ Alfie presses another kiss to the side of his neck. Without pausing with the uniform, Tommy elbows him lightly in the head.

“Not a woman,” he says roughly. “No need for that.”

“That's a sorry attitude to have,” Alfie informs him, but he leaves off all the same. Ain't no good, kissing what don't want it.

But that leaves Alfie with nothing for distraction as the tunic falls open and reveals Tommy's clay-kicker physique, the soldiering spareness of his hips and ribs and hard muscle of his shoulders.

The skin beneath his uniform is as filthy as the rest of him, as filthy as Alfie, so he feels bound by no courtesy when putting his hands on him. Tommy flinches a little, his spine going tight, and he immediately feels why – while his front is mostly intact, the man's back is scraped raw, the skin under Alfie's hands hot and tender.

“Blown up, you said.”

“Dug myself out,” confirms Tommy. Alfie glances down to his hands for confirmation of what must've been a desperate dig, but Tommy's blinking rapidly now, mind veering and avoiding the memory. He takes Alfie's hands and eases them down from his back, directs them to his belt.

Alfie can work with this. He opens the trousers up and doesn't pause at the lack of underwear, because it's a rare lucky bastard in France who has spare kit. But then he finds himself holding a stiffening cock bundled up like a rugelach and he falters.

It's only for a second before he's moving again, grip shifting in the usual way, but his startlement is obvious enough that Tommy looks up from undoing Alfie's own belt and says, “What is it?”

He looks at him, flatly guileless. “Nothing, mate. S'nothing.”

Tommy's brows knit together, clearly not believing him. He feels his cheeks warm and realizes he's fucking blushing for perhaps the first fucking time since his fucking testicles fucking dropped. Fuck this.

To cover the moment, he follows his instincts – _charge_ – and captures Tommy's mouth with his own.

His mouth falls open in surprise but despite his earlier complaints, he kisses back almost hungrily. His hands come up and bury in Alfie's hair, his body surging forward and singing like a plucked string.

Alfie forgets all about injured backs and other, other _strangeness_ and pulls him in tight, jerking him steadily. The foreskin quickly proves itself a silky ally to his efforts.

A hand finally works into his trousers and wraps around his answering hardness. A slight pause. Tommy draws his mouth off and says into the crook Alfie's neck, sounding almost bemused beneath the breathlessness, “Oh. Right.”

Alfie laughs. “Fucking right.”

Tommy pulls his hand completely away, but before Alfie can think to worry, he's bringing it up and licking his palm. His attitude is brisk and matter-of-fact, a sergeant major efficiently tending to company business.

Alfie groans. “You're fucking something, you know that, Tommy.”

“I thought I was fucking you,” says Tommy, and wraps his wet hand back around Alfie's cock. He continues, quite conversational, “Used to wonder about this as a lad, you know. The other boys said a cut cock has no feeling left in it.” His hand twists, clever fingers rubbing the sensitive edge of the head. He smirks. “Guess Johnny was wrong about that.”

Alfie doesn't answer, for once not in the mood for conversing. He rolls his forehead along Tommy's shoulder and loses himself enough to kiss his neck again, he can't help it. Tommy doesn't protest, just tightens his grip.

They breathe and work in tandem under the quiet, clean-smelling shade next to a field full of devastation. It's a dizzying unreality, it's like a dream. Alfie would suspect he's pure lost the rest of his mind and this is all a conjuration, but he would never think to add anything so bizarre and wonderful as Tommy Shelby's uncircumcised cock.

As Tommy's breathing grows more labored and his whole body starts to shake apart, something sparks in his eyes. He throws his head back, twisting it away in the air, lost to Alfie's mouth. With his open collar and dishevelled hair, he is more beautiful than ever.

Their little affair becomes almost more like a fight after that. His messenger is struggling. Fighting and fucking, they're not all that different to Alfie, so he rides the thrashing out and soon enough adds something of his own to the filth streaking Tommy's bare stomach.

Their breathing slows and their surroundings creep back in.

Tommy silently steps away, calmly but quickly doing up his uniform.

Alfie tucks himself into his trousers and watches him closely. “You come back to yourself, then?” he asks. Pun fucking intended.

“Something like that.” His eyes are sharp and clear as he glances past Alfie and back over to the CCS. “I still need to find my brothers. I can't believe I – ” he cuts himself off, frowning – over the personal disclosure or the fucking flagrant rudeness, he can't tell.

Alfie watches him, hands down at his sides, already losing the feeling he'd grasped something real. Tommy notices his look and obviously tries not to return the stare. The cool composure he'd so shakily reached for earlier is more intact now. Alfie can barely tell it's a cover at all.

_Oh Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?_

“Alfie,” says Tommy and stops. He drags his fingers up through his hair, raking it back from his forehead. It's testament to the grime that it stays fair in place when the hand falls away. “You didn't give me a last name,” he says at last.

“Are you looking to report me?” he asks, tickled for some reason by the notion. The bloody cheek of it.

“No,” comes the impatient reply. “I just always like to know who I'm dealing with.”

“You know the family names of your whores back home and you think it makes you a gentleman, is that it?”

The impatience is stronger now. “ _Alfie_ – ”

He says, “Ask around for the mad Jew captain, I'm sure you'll be pointed in the right direction.” The Wandering Jew of the Guards Division, they call him, or so he'll tell people back home who'll know what it means and be suitably impressed.

“I've got to go find my brothers,” Tommy says after a frustrated pause. “Alfie, look at me.”

But he's already looking. He's looking at the cruel line of Tommy's mouth and his cold blue eyes what will make a feast for the worms in some deep dark hole beneath the German line. He's thinking if Tommy was a messenger, Alfie's received his message.

It is better, he thinks, if he doesn't grow accustomed. Man could lose the other half of his mind, thinking of a mouth like this while down in the trenches with only the grey face of Fritz and knobbly bits of Bill for company.

Tommy reaches into his pocket and draws out his cigarettes. He taps one on his case for a few seconds, waiting, but Alfie has nothing more to say to him. After a while, Tommy turns and starts walking back to the white tents of the station, his clean tunic like a fucking beacon against the dark wood.

Alfie stands a little longer in the shade, but the smell of the field is drifting in. It's closer than he'd realized, and upwind.

And he still needs to get his foot seen to.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title pulled from Alfie's epic rant to Tommy in 3x06.
> 
> The “bits of Bill” is direct from the journal of a soldier I remember being read on Dan Carlin's podcast episode Blueprint for an Armageddon. I should probably go back and find the specific name, but damn, this ain't a history paper and I honestly don't think the soldier would mind going uncredited in this story about dudes giving each other a hand job.
> 
> The italicized line Alfie thinks about near the end is from a poem about British soldiers by Rudyard Kipling, who was a racist prick. (Apropos of nothing, I just think that asterisk should accompany any usage of his work. Get on that, jungle book producers.)


End file.
